Drive. Camp. Repeat. Bengaluru’s overlanders blaze new trails | Bengaluru News

Bengaluru: For a growing number of Bengalureans, their home for the day is where they park their caravan or camper, or even the car. They are a part of the overlander community, a growing tribe that packs bags, groceries and laptops for road trips in their cars with tents or pop-up campers.Overlanding, say travellers, gives them freedom to explore places at their own pace without having to worry about booking good hotels or stays — they just set their ‘nice cosy home’ by riverside or mountainside.Pahalgam in 2023A Bengaluru couple recalls one such experience in Pahalgam, Kashmir, in April 2023. “We had camped in Aru Valley. We woke up at 6am and were sipping coffee when it started snowing suddenly. It was beautiful. There was six inches of snow in less than half hour. It’s quite rare to snow in April there,” says Raveen B V, a 62-year-old retired businessman. “That was the first time we had experienced snowfall,” adds his wife Meenakshi, 60.Raveen started biking and travelling in the 1980s, during his college days in Coimbatore. Lucky for him, he also happened to marry a like-minded person in 1988, and he continued his passion for travel and photography with her. Those were the days without GPS, and all they had were maps.Raveen and Meenakshi travelled to one state for a month every year by bus, train or any local transport and later, in their car, with their children. They eventually upgraded to Seltos with a rooftop tent. Now, they have a camper on their off-road vehicle Toyota Hilux.(Campers can be customised for amenities like bed, kitchen, bathroom, air conditioner, generator etc.)“We are vegetarians who love cooking. We carry groceries from here and sometimes, buy on the way if required. We try to avoid plastic completely and if we use, we carry it back to Bengaluru and dispose it the right way,” says Raveen.“The best part of overlanding is wherever you are, you own that place for that day. We park our vehicle, mingle with children and villagers. We can feel the pulse of India,” he says. The camper is not a permanent structure. “I can remove the six bolts it stands on and use the vehicle as a regular car as well,” adds Raveen.The duo says India’s roads, in excellent condition, have made their journeys more convenient. They take turns and drive over 400km to 500km a day. “We have done Golden Quadrilateral, Odisha, covered 26 temples in 26 days across Kerala, char dham yatra, Vaishno Devi, several roadtrips to Uttarakhand with our daughter and son and grandsons. We went to Kumbh Mela in Innova with our nephew this year,” says Meenakshi. While visiting the highest motorable village in the world, Komic in Himachal, Meenakshi and Raveen met a young overlanding couple, their two their kids and pet dog. They soon became good friends. “They were from Kerala and worked in Delhi. We invited them for dinner and they called us over for lunch. We had a great time,” says Raveen.Travelling has encouraged Meenakshi to pursue her passion in birdwatching too. While camping in Goa two years ago, she spotted birds-of-paradise in Panjim, and realised they had been visiting her farmhouse in Bengaluru as well, where the couple had been living for three decades.The two are planning to throw seed balls at different places during their travel in monsoons and work on different social projects. In June, Raveen and Meenakshi will fly to Scotland where they are planning to overland on the NC500 route.You can start with your hatchbackOverlanding doesn’t need a full-blown camper or a caravan system. Many travel in their hatchbacks or Eecovan with basic amenities like a tent. That’s how the journey of Mansoor Ishaq, now a 56- year-old travel entrepreneur, started. Always a travel and automobile enthusiast, he regularly drove to Kashmir, Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh in his car with tents, before turning a full-time overlander in 2011. His job as a solo travel entrepreneur gives him the complete freedom to do so too.Mansoor currently drives Isuzu D-max V-Cross 4×4 with pop-up camper that is fixed with four clips and opens three feet into the air. It includes his wardrobe, work desk, bed, camping stove, spare water and diesel cans, and toolkits. His has no washroom or kitchen. He alternates between restrooms in petrol pumps or houses of some kind locals.He now calls Kashmir, Ladakh or Himachal home from July to Sept or Oct; northeast from Nov to Feb; and the remaining months in Western Ghats, in the valleys of Niligiris Hills or Coorg, after spending a month in Bengaluru.“For the past 12 years, I have done 200 plus day trips every year,” he says proudly, adding the longest trip he’s taken is 165 days in the northeast in 2023, mostly solo and occasionally guiding tourists .‘It’s about the journey & landscape’Ask why overlanding, Mansoor says, “When it comes to other modes of transport like flights, it is more about the destination, but when it is overland, it’s more about the journey and landscape.”A slow traveller, he drives about 400km to 600km a day, stopping to explore local cuisine, experiencing the cultures and listening to stories of people. Once when he was driving with an American couple on a slushy track in Manipur, far away from the nearest town, they came across two women and a man carrying guns and worn-out baskets on their back. “We saw a fluffy tail popping out of one basket. We later realised they had hunted down a civet cat and were taking it home to skin it and eat its meat.“A father-son projectFor 25-year-old Kevin Crawford, his overlanding journey started as a father-son project during the Covid-19 pandemic. The two built a prototype for a camper, but before Kevin could test it, he had to leave for Scotland for his master’s degree. However, his parents, now in their 50s, took it for a test drive to Kabini and later to Goa and fell in love with it.In Scotland, Kevin rented a caravan with three friends and went on a two-week road trip on the popular NC500 route, covering the entire coastal line from east to west.After he returned to Bengaluru a year ago, he turned his passion into a business — building campers costing Rs 5.5 lakh and upwards. “Due to the business, I haven’t been able to go on long trips often, but I travel with my friends almost every weekend,” he adds.A growing tribe The community of overlanders is gradually growing in India. Currently, Overlanders Association of India, which holds week-long annual meetups for overlanders from across the country, has about 600-700 members.The community of overlanders in Karnataka holds weekend trips usually on every second Saturday of the month.